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Lithium battery cargo linked to plane disappearance

Chris Buckley and Nicola Clark

Sepang, Malaysia: As the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet expanded into the vastness of the Indian Ocean, investigators are looking at the possibility that a shipment of lithium batteries in the airliner’s cargo hold may have caught fire and felled the aircraft.

A satellite communications company also confirmed on Friday that it had recorded electronic "keep alive" ping signals from the plane after it disappeared, and said those signals could be analysed to help estimate its location.

The information from the company, Inmarsat, could prove to be a big break in helping narrow the frustrating search for the plane with 239 people aboard that mysteriously disappeared from radar screens a week ago, now hunted by a multinational array of ships and planes that have fanned out for thousands of square miles.

Until now, that search has turned up false leads: oil slicks, chunks of foam, life vests and other debris unconnected to the vanished plane.

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But a series of electronic pings sent by the aircraft could help the search, which is shifting focus from the relative confines of the Gulf of Thailand and nearby waters to include the Indian Ocean on the other, western side of Malaysia.

A senior American official who had been briefed on the contents listed on the plane’s cargo manifest said a “significant load” of lithium batteries had been aboard - raising suspicions because of previous cargo-plane crashes attributed to lithium battery shipments, which can overheat and cause intense fires.

However, that possibility is inconsistent with information that the plane may have kept flying for hours after it vanished.

News reports that Malaysian military radar may have tracked the plane, a Boeing 777, turning back from its original route to cut across the Malaysian peninsula and head west towards the Indian Ocean before vanishing last Saturday have drawn growing anger from China, where nearly two-thirds of the passengers came from.

If the aircraft did divert so drastically from its planned route, any traces of it captured by satellites and military radar will become all the more important.

David Coiley, a vice-president of Inmarsat, a British satellite telecommunications provider, said the missing plane had been equipped with a signaling system from the company that sends out a "keep-alive message" to establish that the plane's communications system is still switched on.

The plane sent out a series of such messages after radar contact was lost, he said. Those messages later stopped, but he declined to specify precisely when or how many messages had been received. Mr Coiley said Inmarsat was sharing the information with the airline and investigators.

"It does allow us to determine where the airplane is relative to the satellite," he said of the signal, which he likened to the "noises you might hear when you when a cellphone sits next to a radio or a television speaker." He said: "It does allow us to narrow down the position of the aircraft" - at the moment when the signal was sent.

Such equipment automatically checks in to satellites, much as a mobile phone would check in to a network after passing through a mountain tunnel, he said. Because the pings go over a measurable distance at a specific angle to one of the company's satellites, the information can be used to help calculate the trajectory of an aircraft and narrow down its approximate location - though not necessarily its resting point.

"Communications systems are part of the mandatory requirement for operating any flight, and we are comfortable that it would have been operating accordingly," Mr Coiley said.

At a news conference, the Malaysian Defence Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said that searching seas both to the east and west of his country was a logical next step after days of fruitless searching and false starts. But he also acknowledged that, seven days after it vanished, an aircraft with 239 passengers and crew aboard remains unaccounted for, leaving family members in tormented wait.

"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new information focuses on the search," said Mr Hussein, who is also acting Transport Minister. "But this is not a normal investigation."

He said the multinational search had expanded on both sides of Malaysia, into the South China Sea, and increasingly into the Indian Ocean. "It is basically because we have not found anything in the areas that we have searched," he said.